The Israel Defense Forces on Thursday eliminated a Hamas commander who directed the kidnapping of civilians during the Palestinian terror group’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, the military said on Saturday.
Walid Haniyeh, who served as the deputy commander of a Nukhba Force company in Hamas’s “military wing,” continued to recruit and train terrorists during the past two-and-a-half years of war, according to the statement.
He infiltrated the Jewish state on Oct. 7 and provided “operational instructions to the terrorist cell as they took Israeli civilians hostage into the Gaza Strip,” it stated.
Haniyeh was a nephew of Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh, whom Israel assassinated in Tehran in July 2024, the IDF added.
The Oct. 10, 2025, truce agreement ended the two-year war in the Gaza Strip that began when Hamas, other Palestinian terrorist groups and Gazan “civilians” invaded the northwestern Negev on Oct. 7, 2023, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.
On Friday, the IDF killed three operatives in Hamas’s naval police unit, including the commander in the central camps sector, according to a statement on Sunday.
“Hamas’s naval police operates under Hamas’s military wing and advances and directs terror attacks against IDF troops and the State of Israel,” it noted.
Mansour Sami Mahmoud Shahtout and two other terrorists “were traveling in a vehicle while armed with weapons, and as such posed a threat to IDF troops operating in the Gaza Strip,” the army stated.
In a separate airstrike on Wednesday, the IDF killed Abd al-Rahman Maher Abd al-Karim Ziyada, who commanded a Nukhba Force cell and stole an Israeli military vehicle during the Oct. 7 assault, the military said on Sunday.
In an additional strike that day, the IDF eliminated Kamal Mohammad Hamdan Najjar, head of a Hamas tunnel unit in the Khan Yunis area.
The IDF said that throughout the war, both operatives attempted to “advance terrorist attacks against IDF troops in the Gaza Strip.” It added, “The terrorists posed an immediate threat to the troops and were eliminated in precise strikes.”
